


For Auld Lang Syne (Y2K Crash)

by Dienaziscum



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blood and Gore, Homophobic Language, Hypothermia, M/M, Serious Injuries, Slurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 16:35:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17328587
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dienaziscum/pseuds/Dienaziscum
Summary: On the eve of the new millenium, a Hydra-infiltrated STRIKE Team's quinjet crashes in the Arctic Circle. The Winter Soldier is only recently attached to the team, and he has some opinions about their newest rookie operative. Rumlow has some opinions of his own about Hydra's asset, but it's hard to convey them properly as hypothermia sets in.





	For Auld Lang Syne (Y2K Crash)

It is New Year’s Eve, the last hours of 1999 ticking past. So says the newspaper he’s pilfered from one of the rucksacks that hadn’t disappeared into the smoking, crushed mess of the downed jet’s fuselage.

The rucksack’s owner had not been so lucky. For a long while, the air had been thick with the blistering stench of burning gasoline, overheating metal, and the awful, acrid miasma of the rucksack owner's flesh and bone and blood, along with that of three other operatives, gone up in flames.

A fifth lies sprawled unconscious at his feet, some mouthy rookie with a mean streak a mile wide that still can’t swallow up his insecurity.

A sixth, the commander of this STRIKE Team, is fighting a pointless battle for life. Most of his insides are outside of him, strewn about the cockpit. Still, he will not stop gasping in huge wet breaths for air that stands no chance of saving him. He’s been talking to his mother for about five minutes now; he will expire soon.

Then, the soldier can read in peace. He thinks that he does not have the chance to read much at all, anymore. He can’t remember. To clutch the newsprint feels like something best done surreptitiously, although he doesn’t bother to act on that feeling for now.

He is too hungry for information. He consumes it with a voracious and singular focus.

A whole new millenium will dawn tomorrow--or perhaps it already has. They are so far above the Arctic Circle that there will be no sunrise, not even a shift in the thread-thin hint of silvery light that marks the horizon. Extraction may be hours away, or days. It may never come at all.

Appropriate reactions to this prospect: Despair. Panic. Desperation. Terror.

All he can feel is a cold sort of fascination with the changing of the year. The century.

The new _millenium._

( _We’re going to the future. Flying cars. Holy cow._ )

He blinks hard to clear the crackling at the edges of his vision. Checks the tourniquet bound high and tight on his thigh, above the compound fracture. Cinches it harder. Notes the pooling blood in which he sits, wondering how far it might have spread were the blood not freezing on contact now with the cracked steel floor.

The soldier folds the paper out big and square, turns to the next page, and turns it back down on itself in quarters. Neat and tidy, to mind the elbow room of the others on the subway.

No, that’s not--he’s never---

Groaning. Guttural, obtrusive: the rookie thrashes awake.

The soldier reads another three columns of print above the fold before the rookie has dragged himself all the way back to consciousness.

The rookie cycles through the appropriate reactions to their current plight. He panics. He looks out at the wreckage, at the vast expanse of ice and snow beyond it, and becomes the very picture of fear.

He stifles it, not quite fast enough, with anger.

Huh. The soldier had overlooked that potential reaction, but it makes sense; the rookie wears it like a mantle. He levels it at the soldier now, shoving himself into a crouch and creeping close. A lot of yelling follows, along with a lot of finger-jabbing and frankly stupid questions with obvious answers that the soldier does his best to provide without condescension.

Why didn’t you pull them out (they were dead as soon as the fuel tanks blew).

Stupid fuck, this ain’t a goddamn library you can just kick back and _read in;_ our commander is dying up there (he is already dead; that’s a death rattle).

Gonna sit on your ass like you’re on leave instead of getting on the radio and calling in this clusterfuck (comms are down; there is no power, no signal, no point trying).

Did you even _pretend_ to check, or did they fry all the initiative right out of you?

This time, STRIKE’s latest addition growls the query right up in the soldier’s face. The soldier watches his teeth clacking together with cold as he awaits the soldier’s response, which is only to shrug. He can’t keep track of what they fry out of him. He feels that this is, fairly obviously, the whole point of the frying.

The rookie seethes at him in impotent fury, and the soldier tracks the thick rivulets of blood that crawl down the side of his throat. He’ll burn himself out with this instigatory nonsense soon enough. In the meantime, the soldier settles back against the dented curve of the plane’s cabin and tries to dredge up a name to match the rookie’s goading face.

Rambo? No. The soldier stifles a smirk, though he doesn’t know why.

Rumlow. Yes. He can hear it on the other agents’ lips. Rookie Rumlow. Hurry the fuck up, Rumslow.

_Hey Dumblow, flap on over here and gimme a hand with the mag cuffs before it wakes up all the way. It’s a real handful before they wipe it._

“What the fuck’s so funny, freak?”

Rumlow snatches the newspaper and sends flying into the wreckage.

“You have a head injury,” the soldier points out, instead of snatching up Rumlow and throwing him bodily to follow the paper’s trajectory. The jagged corkscrew of metal that’s dug into the underside of his own thigh requires that he remain still so as not to dislodge it or drive it deeper.

“That’s _funny_?”

“No. But you should stop yelling. You’ll bleed more.”

“Bullshit,” Rumlow snaps, and shoves himself away from the soldier to start pacing. “This is _bullshit_.”

The soldier can’t reasonably argue the point, so he stays quiet. He is not supposed to argue except when the success of a mission depends on his tactical insights. He is not supposed to engage in nonessential communication at all, otherwise. Recent and intensive conditioning has made this new precept clear. But it _is_ new, and it chafes, though it shouldn’t.

What is essential is that he act to prevent further collateral damage. The snow is already sticking to the floor of the cockpit and cabin, split open as it is like a tin of sardines. The soldier estimates that Rumlow will progress from mild to moderate hypothermia in less than thirty minutes. Quicker than that, if he’d knock off his otherwise useless prowling.

The cold will not harm the soldier. He does not want to think on how he came to understand this; he simply understands it. Even the slow leaching of blood could go on for many long hours more before true hypovolemic shock set in. For now, he must endure the dizziness and the fluttery racing of his pulse. It is all negligible, familiar, unremarkable.

“You’re going to need more gear,” he says when Rumlow’s pacing goes erratic and the bitching he’s kept up under his breath becomes a mushy slur. “You’re freezing.”

“F-f-fuck you.”

“That’d help, but not for long.”

The rookie stares at him a long time before snorting and cracking a strange, leery grin. A few seconds later, he thuds to his knees and sends a rattle through the hull.

“More gear. Before you can’t move to get it,” the soldier says, sharper this time.

“ _You_ move to get it. You ain’t my fuckin’ CO.”

The soldier looks pointedly at his own thigh, then back at the rookie. “So I bleed out because I have to get up and swaddle STRIKE’s most incompetent baby agent, and then what? You think your stubborn ass gets promoted? You’re expendable, rookie. Get your own fucking gear, or have the decency to go freeze to death out there where I don’t have to listen to you whine about it.”

This is, perhaps, not entirely essential communication. The dumbfounded, outraged look on Rumlow’s face confirms as much. Still, the point stands.

It must sink in right along with the frigid wind that kicks up and whistles through the cabin, because Rumlow’s gaze casts about with increasing urgency. The mangled back end of the plane offers nothing, having swallowed up the team’s cases of spare uniforms and equipment along with the team members themselves. There is only the now-dead CO, a limp and stinking smear at the front of the cabin.

Rumlow goes faintly green as he wobbles to his feet and approaches what’s left of the CO. Maybe it’s the concussion; maybe it’s the thought of peeling a tactical suit off of its significantly mangled owner and donning it, stiff with frozen blood and offal.   
  
Rumlow laughs, brittle and mirthless. “What a fuckin’ mess,” he mutters. “Not an inch of gear on him that ain’t shredded.”

The rookie attempts to keep himself in motion, but the effort is short-lived. His limbs are starting to misbehave, and the soldier watches his eyelids grow ever-heavier with hypothermic stupor.

The soldier undoes the straps of his own vest and ignores the splotchy haze that overtakes his vision as he sits up straighter to shrug it off. “Come here,” he says.

Whatever the rookie tries to snap at him next gets lost in the throes of a relentless, wracking shiver. The soldier is inclined to let him die. Stupidity, masquerading as pride, has killed far better men than this; he has no patience for it. But there will be consequences for tonight’s failed mission and lost operatives, and the soldier will, inevitably, bear the brunt of those consequences.

He crunches up a fistful of snow and squeezes it until it’s packed hard as a rock. It breaks over Rumlow’s face in a shower of glittering powdered ice. “Now,” he orders.

At last, Rumlow lurches over to the soldier on his knees. He stalls out then, looking lost. The soldier takes him by the jacket and hauls him into position, so that the rookie is straddling his lap. Facing him like this, pressed together chest to chest, the rookie can’t seem to do anything but stare at the soldier’s mouth.

The soldier darts his tongue out over his lower lip.

_(Bastard. Quit bein’ such a tease, will ya?)_

“Knock that shit off,” Rumlow snarls, snapping to attention. The soldier can feel his whole body jerk with it, startled and defensive as prey. “I ain’t some goddamn faggot.”

“Okay,” says the soldier tonelessly as he pins Rumlow against himself and settles the tactical vest over his shoulders. Rumlow struggles, then abruptly melts into him with his face buried in the crook of the soldier’s shoulder.

The soldier might find this wholesale acquiescence notable, were he not half-gone in his own head, chasing ravenously after something shapeless and nameless. It slips away--backward, earlier, dislodged from _before,_ then gone in a swirl, just as glacial as the wind that slices through the jet’s strained seams.

“Happy new year,” he murmurs. The words all but choke him.

“Yeah, some party this is,” Rumlow slurs, muzzy against the soldier’s throat. “Wonder if all the computers blew up because of the whole Y2K---”

“Wasn’t talking to you,” the soldier says. “Go to sleep.”

Rumlow does. The soldier does not, because sleep is nonessential, unlike vigilance--and because he does not want to dream the sort of dreams that dredge up hints of faces from the coldness of the void.


End file.
